Sleepover: Ups and Downs

So I went to a sleepover with some friends of mine from out-of-town over the weekend. As always, it was super-fun :D  We played Mario Kart 8, Super Mario 3D World, Hyrule Warriors; we played Cards Against Humanity and Lords of Waterdeep; we nearly set the host's house on fire by lighting the candles too early, leading everyone in attendance to sing Happy Birthday at 300 bpm so he could blow the candles out faster—it was certainly a fun weekend :)

There was kind of an underlying downside to it, though. There was nothing I regretted doing, and there were no points at which I felt bad or anything—there was just this occasional undercurrent of concern about a few things.



First off, a really specific, inconsequential thing about Cards Against Humanity. The last two times I've played with this group, I've performed miserably. Back in June, I think I only scored one or two points, and when I played last weekend, I score zero points, with both games ending when someone got, like, five or six points. And I remember feeling awful after the June game, cos I'm like "...I'm the funny person. This is that one thing I'm supposed to be good at. I did good back in February, and that was my first time playing! So why am I now doing so poorly? Why?" I wasn't playing to win, necessarily, but it was a strong feeling of incompetence to realise that I was a comedian who'd completely failed at making people laugh, and this failure occurred in a game which supposedly makes it as easy as possible for you to get those laughs.

This time around, though, I didn't really care that much, cos I realised it's just luck-based. It all comes down to what white cards you get, and what black cards are drawn. When I write jokes, I'm not forced to work at the mercy of Lady Luck: I have to actually form the content, the only constraint being my own incompetence. My jokes aren't a combination of two or more existing ideas: it's me creating my own ideas and expressing them in my own way. They're two totally different things. What the fuck am I supposed to do when the only cards I have in my hand just don't fit with the black card? No amount of intellect or creativity can fix that.

And granted, I've only played the game, like, four times, and the other two didn't go horribly at all. So maybe this is just a coincidence, the sample size being too small to draw any real conclusions. But yeah, even though it seems like nothing, and may even seem like my ego talking, it sucks to be unfunny when you feel you're supposed to be funny. And this is coming from someone who's bombed for 45 minutes straight before :P  No biggie though, just a minor thing.



A slightly less minor thing is the fact that I don't have many stories to tell, at least not interesting ones. I feel as though when I'm in the right mindset (which I was pretty much the entire weekend), I can readily listen to people's stories and respond appropriately. Two guys went to the US for a game developer expo of some kind, so I asked them how it was, and they ended up discussing what games they showed off, how they worked, what they planned to add, etc. So I'm good on that front—not perfect, but good.

As for telling stories... :/   I was chatting with one of my friends from the group, and he was telling these stories about his friends and how he met one of them, their drunken shenanigans (he doesn't drink but his friends do), relationship drama—you know, shit that's interesting. But then he asked me to tell a story. What stories do I have? Not many, really. And the ones I do have are all ones where I do something incredibly fucking stupid and have to suffer the consequences for it :P  Pretty much the only story I could even think of was that time where I blogged about a girl I wanted to fuck and people found the blogs. Nothing else really came to mind, aside from one other thing (which I'm not gonna mention cos only the group I slept over with would actually understand the story).

And it's not like I haven't done anything with my life over the past nine years; it's just that the few other stories I do have seem tame compared to everyone else's. I can't remember much of what happened during the school plays or the musical I was in, I haven't been to many parties (and the ones I have been to haven't been anything to write home about), I don't go out to bars or clubs, and most of my friends are relatively similar in that regard. To be fair, the friend in question was talking largely about his friends and what they've done rather than himself and what he's done, but I couldn't even go that route. Incidentally, I do have stories written down as stage material, but it just didn't seem to fit here—that stuff was all about how I told jokes on assembly at high school without permission, and being accused of a whole bunch of shit I never did cos some of the staff at that school were judgemental asshats. It's more "listen to what these morons did" than "listen to this crazy thing my friend did". I mean, maybe the stories I told didn't have to be related to the stories the other person told, and I was just scrambling for unnecessary relevance. Who knows :P

Like the CAH thing, I wasn't super bummed when I came to the realisation I didn't have stories to tell, but it was still somewhat annoying to not feel as though anything I had to say was worth saying. And that's not the kind of thing you can fix very quickly.

But yeah, apart from that, it was a pretty awesome weekend. I've also let them know about the sleepover thing that I'm planning, and the ones who've responded have said they're free, so it looks set to go ahead :D